Exclusive: Interview With 'Superman: Requiem' Producer Gene Fallaize Part 1.

I've been lucky enough to have the chance to chat with Gene Fallaize, co-producer, writer, and director of the upcoming fan-film 'Superman: Requiem', and he talks about the choice of costume, the classic Superman theme, any cameos we may see, easter eggs hinting at other DC characters, and much more.

What do you think it is that will set your fan-film apart from the hundreds we've seen before?

I think it is because we have the benefit of having an almost exclusively professional cast and crew on board. Before this I’d never really heard of fan-films, but obviously I’ve been looking at a lot since Requiem came about, and there are some really great ones, and I admire them all for having the drive to get out there and make a fan-film, as they really aren’t easy at all. Other fans want different things from fan films and can get quite upset when they go in a different direction, so keeping everyone happy is one of the hardest things to do, but as long as there is a clear vision from the start I think it makes it much easier. With Requiem I’m blessed to have such a fantastic and supportive cast and crew that aren’t only professionals that do this for a living every other day and are notable in what they do, but they are all huge Superman fans too, so the bar is constantly being raised as everyone on board wants to achieve the best film possible, by using the skills at the same professional level they use every day on other large scale productions.

On Friday we heard the news that you had cast Martin Richardson as Clark Kent, what was it about him that made you think "This is our Superman"?

Martin is just great, as soon as he walked into the room myself and my other producers looked at each other and gave ‘the look’, because his presence is perfect for the dual role of Superman/Clark Kent. His passion and dedication to the character is astounding, and he continually strives improve to perfect the character. I’ve heard some comments saying “but he doesn’t look like Reeve or Routh”, and that’s correct – I didn’t cast an impersonator of Reeve or Routh, I cast an actor based on his performance and ability to portray Superman/Clark Kent. Imagine how different Donner’s Superman would have been if instead of Reeve they cast someone who looked and acted like George Reeves interpretation of the character for example. Of the several hundreds of applications we had, Martin was hands down the best for the character, and I would ask fans to reserve judgement until they’ve seen it. We couldn’t be happier with him though, and even if we had a huge budget, Martin would probably still have got the role.

What was your reasoning for excluding Lois Lane from the story, and introduce a new character Ali Noels? Very clever anagram of Lois Lane might I add.

Haha, I did wonder how long it would take for people to realise it was an anagram! The biggest problem I knew we would have going into this was retaining continuity from the history of the character before this instalment. When Superman Returns came about there was lots of debate about the casting, and if they were right or wrong, which is inevitable when you recast key roles after others before them spent so long in the shoes of those characters, so I felt the best way to get over that was to put some of the characters ‘on-hold’, by giving them a side-story for their absence. Lois, for example, was in the Reeve movies, was in Superman Returns, and we know that she’s going to be in Snyder’s ‘Man of Steel’ too, so we didn’t want to recast her along with lots of other established characters and potentially take them in a new direction that could disrupt the continuity of the history of the characters. We’ve had to keep some, such as Superman/Clark and Perry White, but we’ve swapped Lois for Ali, and Lex for his estranged son Alex, and also put Jimmy Olsen ‘on-hold’ and bringing back Cat Grant from the comics so that it does retain some level of continuity, while making it a new chapter in its own right.

This movie has certainly been getting more attention than other fan-films before it, why do you think that is?

I think it is because we are treating this as if it is a big budget Superman film. We have all the same teams and departments doing the same roles on this film that we have on all our other bigger productions, so I think the fact that we are treating like a big Superman film right down the line is propagating through to audiences who can already see that this isn’t just another fan-film. Though other fan-films before us have had I’m sure the same passion and dedication, I don’t think there are many that have been able to achieve such high production values with such a low budget, simply because we all do this for a living, and we’ve been able to call upon other industry contacts to make this truly different.

With the new movie poster that was released, we got our first good look at the costume being used. Is there any particular reason you decided to go with more of a classic design, as opposed to updating the suit?

Yes, this was a conscious decision to retain some familiarity from the previous films. I know that some fans don’t like the Reeve-style costume, but we are already putting some of the characters on hold and pushing the pre-set boundaries that the history of Superman had put in place, so we decided that the costume should be one of the elements that is familiar to audiences, because although some don’t like it, it is one of the fundamental basics of Superman – the red cape, the pants on the outside – everybody knows it. I think if I was directing the next big Superman film, we would have definitely updated the costume, but for this film fans need something to relate to, something grounded, so that it’s not totally different. We still want it to feel like the Superman films we’re used to as audiences.